If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

—from 1914: “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke

In the spring of 1924 three people—two women and a man—stepped off a dusty train in Taos, New Mexico and into the wide emptiness of the desert. It had been a long journey from frenetic hubbub of New York City, where the train ride had begun, and an even longer one from cold, dreary London, where the journey had begun. They were fleeing the ruins of Europe, still suffering from the shell-shock of the Great War. They intended—like many before them—to found a new, perfect Utopia in the American West. The apparent emptiness of the desert landscape seemed a suitable blank canvas on which to create their vision.

I say “their,” but in fact the reason the trio is in the desert at all is because of the man, Abe—a charismatic philosopher who dreams of a world free of the “mechanized horror,” as DH Lawrence once described it, that is post-war Europe. Abe has come to Taos to establish a truly democratic and egalitarian society, where women and men are completely, utterly equal. As a statement of commitment to this ideal only a man could make, he has brought with him his wife, Vera, and the woman who (among other things) wants to be his lover.

It is that young woman, Doll, who speaks to the reader in Amy Boaz’s A Richer Dust. The novel is a triptych of Doll’s life; to the left a panel to show her youth in England where she was a child of Queen Victoria’s court before entering the Slade School of Art to become a painter on the eve of the Great War. To the right, a panel of Doll in old age, enjoying an affair with a younger (“He doesn’t know how much younger and I don’t plan to tell him”) mestizo in a Taos that in 1963 is no longer a frontier town. And in the center, the panel of the pivotal event in her life, for which both youthful follies and old age indulgences are prologue and epilogue; the story of how she came to leave England and all she had known behind, and followed Abe into the wilderness.

Like a triptych, one feels that in this story the middle panel is the reason the thing was made. The novel slides between pre-war England, 1924 New Mexico and 1963 Taos, but always there is the sense that the real story, the important story, is the center one. Doll’s own narrative wanders among these three different time periods sometimes with the benefit of headings like “Taos, 1963” or “Victorian London, 1890s” but sometimes with little warning at all. To be fair, the headings aren’t necessary. Boaz is a competent writer and never loses or disorients her reader as she jumps from era to era. But no matter how far Doll strays into the past or the future, she always comes back around to the year 1924, as if her existence were forever in orbit around the events of that year.

By her own account, the Doll who tried to learn to paint in London was a meek woman; sexually inexperienced, forever out of place among her fellow students at the Slade not only because she was the daughter of a Viscount, not only because she was deaf, but also because she happened to have some real talent. When she meets the charismatic and controversial philosopher Abe at a gallery show, he is one of the few people to see the talent before anything else. His clear regard wins her instant and devoted hero-worship. When, after the War, he proposes to “sail away from this lost world and establish a place of harmony and good will—a new colony for humanity’s redemption” Doll’s only thought is whether or not her father will let her take her inheritance when she follows him. “I would go anywhere with you” she says. “You are brave” says Abe “I knew you were, from the first painting I saw.”

Abe’s wife Vera, it must be said, is less impressed with Doll’s bravery and Doll’s painting. But she used to the company of artists and philosophers, familiar with the sometimes unusual relationships that form in their society, and she has as much self confidence as Doll lacks, so she is more than equal to the task of dealing with one star struck female painter.

Doll, Abe, and Vera have come to Taos at the invitation of a wealthy rancher and masterful woman named Janie—a woman who has been importing culture, it seems, because they find other poets and artists already installed. Janie and her husband Junior (an Indian “tall as a silver fir, broad and commanding in his silence”) gift them a mountain for their dream. The three ride up towards the sky to a couple of rundown cabins—the ramshackle foundation of their egalitarian utopia.

They immediately run into trouble. For one thing, although Doll lives by herself in a small outbuilding on the compound, she is still altogether too close for Vera’s taste. More importantly though, the trio had come to the edge of the desert expecting to find a blank canvas for their dreams only to find the desert anything but blank. It thrums with life. It is populated not just by eagles, bears and wolves, but by Navaho tribes and Mexican migrants, and imported consumptive poets.

Abe, whom they call “Red Fox,” preaches equality to the men, but it is angry, vivacious, Teutonic Vera who preaches empowerment to the women. It is not a lesson that their husbands appreciate, especially when Vera begins to teach the rudiments of family planning which, among other things, involves denying the husbands sex. If Abe is Red Fox, a beloved trickster, then Vera is Yellow Woman, the corn maiden, but sowing unwelcome seeds. The natives become restless, angry.

And Doll—a woman without a man and thus not part of this play and perhaps the only one truly “equal” in Abe’s sense of the word—she simply watches. She attends Abe’s sermons over campfires, where she is accepted since, without a man she is not truly a woman in their midst. She helps Vera with some of her efforts to bring modern medicine to the pueblos. She also rides and hunts with the ranch hands (riding and shooting, oddly enough, being two of the skills every British aristocrat must learn). And she paints, struggling to capture the wide expanses of the sky and mountains onto her canvases. She is not successful, but she begins to feel that this land has, indeed, a richer dust she is standing upon. The title of the book comes from the poem above—a glorification of the soldiers who died in battle. Abe rejects the notion that wherever an Englishman stands or falls, he makes that piece of ground “a piece of England.” He is trying to flee England, after all. But Doll sees it differently—“I think it is a richer dust out here” she ventures at one point. Neither Vera nor Abe seem to understand.

But if Doll is suffered to find her place in this new world, the others are not so blessed. They are unprepared for the winter, which aggravates Abe’s own precarious health. They become embroiled in the small petty jealousies that occur in every closed community. They fight, with each other and with everyone else. Eventually Abe and Vera go too far in disturbing the natural order of things and the Navaho leaders—Junior among them—decide the mountain needs to be cleansed of their disruptive influence. Yellow Woman must be sacrificed.

Woven in and out of this story is the quiet voice of the older Doll, the one in 1963 who has survived the trauma of that fateful year and now looks from the vantage point of her own bed, her arms wrapped tenderly, gratefully around her young lover. She is still here, in the desert, still painting, and is even gaining some recognition for her work. Her canvases no longer attempt to capture the sky and contain it. Instead she paints Navaho subjects. The spirits of the Old Ones are in her work.

The story of Abe, Vera, and Doll progresses slowly, by fits and starts, largely because of Doll’s uncertain narration and sometimes myopic point of view. She doesn’t always seem to understand what she is seeing, and feels constantly hampered by her deafness. By contrast, the story of the older Doll’s romance with young Akbar is smoothly, beautifully related. It is a lovely portrayal of an older woman’s hard-earned, quiet satisfaction in her own sexuality, and acts as a welcome counterpoint to the younger Doll’s fitful and timid attempts to be what Abe wants her to be. It isn’t until local resentment starts to build against Vera that the story at the center of the novel begins to gather momentum and eclipse the quieter, but somehow more compelling tale of Doll and Akbar. It reaches a denouement at last in Vera’s acquiescence to her own sacrifice. Abe is accepting. Doll is frantic.

There was a reason for the DH Lawrence reference at the beginning of this review. Some readers will have noted that the story of Abe, Vera, and Doll has a familiar ring. In fact, it is a heavily fictionalized account of a real period in the lives of Lawrence, his wife Frieda, and the painter Dorothy Brett. The Lawrences, forever bitten by a kind of wanderlust, came to New Mexico at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose extensive ranch was a gathering place for many of the literary and artistic figures of the era. She gave them a mountain in return for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers, and hoped, it is widely believed, that Lawrence would write a book about her. (He began one called “The Willful Woman” but it was never finished.) A combination of tensions and jealousies between Mabel, Frieda, and Dorothy, Lawrence’s own bad health, and the persistent urge to wander caused the couple to leave after a year for Mexico, then Italy. Dorothy Brett stayed on. When Lawrence died in Italy in 1930, Frieda returned to Taos with his ashes and settled there permanently, re-establishing her connection with Mabel and Dorothy, although it would be stretching a point to call them “friends.” Frieda became almost an object of pilgrimage, visited by people like Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams. And Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ranch became an artists’ and writers’ colony that has, among other things, the distinction of being the place where Dennis Hopper wrote Easy Rider.

Even a casual reader will not miss the connection between the fictional Abe and Vera and the historical David Herbert and Frieda Lawrence, if for no other reason than that the jacket copy makes sure to mention the couple as the “inspiration” for the story. It is one of DH Lawrence’s paintings on the cover of the book, not one of Brett’s. Given its up front admission that Brett and the Lawrences were source material for the story, it is hard not to read the novel as a kind of interpretive portrait of the trio. In this, however, the reader should exercise caution for the author has—perhaps rightly—sacrificed historical fact for the narrative truth of the story. It would be a simplistic approach to equate Abe with Lawrence, Vera with Frieda, Doll with Dorothy Brett. Simplistic, and unrewarding. Brett is perhaps an obscure enough character to allow for some artistic license in recreating her for a novel, but DH Lawrence is a well-known figure who arouses strong opinions and reactions in the minds of his readers. His irrepressible passion, his romanticism and moodiness, his conflicted desires for women and men—these are absent from the novel. (No one, having read Lawrence’s admiring descriptions of the male beauty of the Italian peasants, could doubt for a moment he wouldn’t have noticed the sleek dark beauty of Junior). Much better to accept the characters as they are written, rather than go looking for the “real” Lawrence in Abe’s often querulous and oddly aloof manner. Abe, inevitably, pales in comparison.

In the end, this is Doll’s story. Not Lawrence’s, not Frieda’s, not even Dorothy Brett’s. Read the novel as anything else and you may be in for some disappointment. But read it for what it is—a young woman’s journey towards self-realization, and it is a powerful work.

Originally published here